Productivity

Productivity

Recommended: Citymapper comes to Birmingham

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You can recommend something and mean it yet only later realise that you really, really mean it. Usually that’s just because you liked something and you came to like it more. But in this case, I intellectually knew that Citymapper is a very good app for finding bus, train and walking routes – in London. Also New York. Lots of places.

Just not Birmingham where I live. When you launch Citymapper and you’re in a city it doesn’t cover, it tells you. It also says, listen, maybe we will get to your place some day. Let us know that you want it and we’ll see. No promises, but.

I pressed the button adding my vote for Birmingham and I pressed it thinking I’d never hear another word. Did that and went on to test it all out the next time I was in London. It’s very good and I recommended it thoroughly before putting it away and never giving it another thought.

Until this week when the company emailed to say Birmingham is now covered.

So now I’m trying it out everywhere and for everything and I think it’s great. Go read my original praising review on MacNN.com and then go get the app.

That’s of course especially if it covers your city – and the quickest way to find out is download it and try – but also if it covers cities you ever go to.

Plus, it’s free.

Contently: Freelance lessons from wedding planning

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This is good. The more events I produce the more I realise that my wedding worked the same way – or at least that Angela planned it the way I should do these – and I’ve also realised that the hardest part is other people. Nearly 21 years later, I still haven’t written about this thought but now don’t have to because Contently has done it for me.

And done it well. Yael Grauer writes in part:

STOP TAKING EVERYTHING PERSONALLY
Weddings seem to bring out the worst in some people, amplifying issues and personal insecurities that have been quietly simmering beneath the surface. Handling these situations gracefully is a delicate art, so you have to quickly learn how to take bad news in stride.

Likewise, in freelancing, it’s easy to fixate on rejections or read too much into brief emails from busy, overly caffeinated, or unresponsive editors.

“People will think, ‘my pitch sucked,’ when really it’s that [editors] haven’t had time to look at the pitch, or they are running something similar, or it’s not right for the market. It’s almost never that your pitch sucked, or whatever your knee-jerk scary reaction is,” James-Enger explained.

And if an editor did think your pitch sucked, remember to focus on the eight similar publications that might be interested in your idea rather than the one that turned you down. It’s just business.

7 Freelancing Truths I Learned While Planning My Wedding – Yael Grauer, Contently (14 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

In and On your Business

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You work for yourself and you run a business – even if you also work for someone else and your writing or other creative business is currently a sideline. This is just going to be a very quick thought but it’s something that was pointed out to me and which has been pinballing around my head for about three weeks now.

Every day you spend in your business is a day you’re not spending on it.

Follow. I often go into schools now and it is huge fun but it is almost always a day. If I’m on a deadline writing for you, that’s certainly hours, probably days, maybe weeks. None of which I would change but all of which means I physically can’t work at planning my business or developing my business.

I’d not seen it in this way but I had seen that on the odd occasion that I’ve taken a day off to try finding new commissions, I’ve found them. Usually quite easily and sometimes they’ve become the most enjoyable work I’ve ended up doing.

So I’m going to spend more time doing that, I’m going to deliberately and consciously take more time specifically to work on my business. Do the same, will you? I mean your business. You can work on mine, that’s fine.

Those damn Annual Performance Reviews

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You and your managers pretend these are about developing you and recognising your achievements but all that’s really clear is that are they bollocks. What are they for? Who are they for? It’s not for you and it’s not for getting you more money. Annual performance reviews are about making some token nod toward remembering your name and then ignoring everything when it comes to deciding money.

There’s that thing where a third of your colleagues will fail, a third will do okay and there’s a top third that have to get by on some contrived glory ’cause they sure as hell aren’t getting paid more either.

Now, it’s easy for me to be cynical about these because I’m freelance and don’t have to have them. But for a decade or more I was freelance in the BBC where it was a requirement. I hated every single one – up to the moment I would have them, because they invariably went well. Nonetheless, I hated them more than dental appointments because of one review and one man from before my time at the Corporation.

He was an out-of-his-depth sort who managed a group of fairly awkward writers and me. Not awkward. I was glad to be there, I was doing what I wanted, I got that the job was to get what needed done and I got that the company didn’t owe me anything but the generous salary I had. I was fine. Others were not. So when he had to grade people, he gave the awkward ones good marks and in several cases promotions, and he stuck me with the bad marks because he knew I’d be fine about it.

Frankly, was I fuck. Every other review for every other person that year took about 30 minutes and I made mine take the day. Every single point on every single ridiculous metric, he low-balled it and I argued until I got each one up. Fight, fight, fight – and he won. While I got that review to be far better than he wanted it to be, it was the worst review of the set and I got no raise.

So, he didn’t managed to get the one easy ride he’d planned but he could do the tick that said he’d saved some money.

But of course he saved that yet he lost me. I never worked late again, never came in early again. Didn’t contribute to meetings, didn’t write as well as I had done. I do have trouble assessing the quality of my writing but I thought then that there was a fair chance I was his best writer or at least if there were better I can only think of one person it would be. Actually, thinking about it, yes, she was better than I was. But I’d stake a claim to second best and if you do a Google search now on the names I can remember you won’t find them. None had a writing career after that.

And I didn’t have another review with that guy because by the next year, I was long gone. I was off to an infinitely better job that led directly to my BBC career soon after. He could argue, I suppose, that he helped me there but he did some damage. There was not one single review I ever had anywhere else again that I didn’t go in ready for a fight. Never got one, not one single time: every other review ever was at least great and sometimes superb.

I don’t want to count how many years it is since this boiled me but I can tell you it’s a fair few minutes since I found a funny video about performance reviews and thought I’d point you at it. I think I might take a deep breath and do that next.

Don’t snipe at your boss, swipe instead

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Oh, come on, can we not just get a drink and talk about this? Apparently not. Instead, you can now just swipe right on an app called Niko Niko if you’re not happy. Equally you can swipe left if you’re chipper. Swipe down to use a touch-and-drag happiness meter and seriously, for god’s sake, SAY SOMETHING ALOUD.

I’m into technology and even I’m twitching at this idea of turning office teamwork into something like Community’s Meow Meow Beenz. If you can bear it more than I can, take a read of Fast Company’s article.

When coffee doesn’t cut it: how to keep going

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“There are a few optimal windows for doing your most creative and focused work,” [Assistant Professor Christopher] Barnes says. Most people are at their best in the mid-morning and late afternoon. You might match your circadian rhythm to your schedule by organizing your to-do list around these peaks and valleys. Tate recommends doing “any type of highly detailed work,” such as writing, important decision-making, or technical coding during high-energy hours. During the lulls, you can then turn to tasks that don’t require a great deal of focus: cleaning out your inbox, filling out expense reports, or returning phone calls. “That’s when to do tasks that are like muscle memory work,” she says.

How to Overcome the Midday Slump – Carolyn O’Hara, Harvard Business Review (1 July 2015)

Are we sure coffee doesn’t do the job? It would be helpful. Tea would be even better. But according to O’Hara, moving around and then the opposite, mediation, are what you need. There are reasons and there are more ways to get yourself moving, though: Read the full piece.

What do you give people?

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I was asked this recently: if someone hires you, what exactly do they get? With my British writer self-deprecating depressive-paralysis brain, I immediately replied 120 words per minute typing.

The person asking looked at me pretty much exactly the same way you are now. And she pressed. You’re freelance, you’re a business, tell me exactly why anyone should hire you and what it is that they get from you.

As you read this, I am off in a coffee shop giving her my answer. I may or may not let you know if she looks at me like that again, but here’s what I concluded after soul- and testimonial-searching:

Lively, engaging, inspiring action. Complex issues made not just simple but something you can act on. Very sparky writing with life and verve. Enthusiasm and practical, real-world experience with a newsy approach.

It kills me saying that to you and I’ve got to stop finding it so hard. In between the knife wounds, though, it has helped me vocalising what I do. Trying to vocalise it concisely. Trying to find an actual value for other people in all these things I do that I so love doing. Frankly also searching through testimonials and paraphrasing.

Maybe it’s that last bit that has helped me and that I think it will help you: when what you do works, when what you do helps people, I do think that’s the second best feeling in the world. Understanding, comprehending, accepting that your work has helped people, that’s probably the best. I’ll let you know when I get there.

Something to put off: safely defer emails

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Right now, this minute, I have one email in my inbox and it is killing me. I’m going to bet money that you have a lot more than one, maybe thousands more, and if it isn’t maiming you then that’s only because you’re ignoring it. This is a big deal and it is a big sapping not just of your productivity but of your will to live.

There are ways to deal with this and as you can guess from that one single bloody message in my inbox, I’m using some of these ways. There is one that I am not, have not and until lately haven’t even thought about: deferring emails. Say an email comes in and you don’t want to deal with it now. You can have it vanish and come back tomorrow.

That’s just putting things off, that can’t be right, it can’t be useful but some people live and swear by it, including David Sparks who was as cynical as I still am:

I made fun of deferring email when I first heard of it. It seemed dishonest and gimmicky. However when I tried it out, I quickly became a believer. There’s a lot of email that can stand be putting off for a little bit of time but isn’t worth the extra work and baggage that come with adding it to your OmniFocus or other task manager database. In that case, deferring email really works.

When you’ve got a good email deferment system in place, you get used to seeing an empty inbox so when something shows up, you take it seriously. Simply leaving emails in your inbox (or for that matter any other email box box) results in you getting used to having a bunch of unanswered email and, in my case, malaise and despair. I’m much happier putting an email off for two days and getting it out of my sight than having to see it there every time I open my mail client. Maybe this is just psychology, but it works.

Deferred Email – David Sparks, MacSparky (8 July 2015)

He uses a service called SaneBox but there are others, some of which will take action on your mailbox for you. There are ones I’ve just learnt of, for instance, that will grab all the emails you get from nominated people and bunch them together into one digest at the end of the day. I’m extremely wary of that because it means you’re giving a company complete access to your emails. All of your emails. If you’re thinking that’s a shrug, it’s only email, it’s not like you’re giving them your bank account passwords, answer me this: how does your bank handle your forgetting your password? It emails you a replacement. Stopped you shrugging, doesn’t it?

Nonetheless, if you know and trust a service that does this digest stuff then I can see the advantages. And I am slowly becoming persuaded by SaneBox and the like. Read the full piece by David Sparks for more general information about what these things do and how they help plus some very specific detail of how he uses them.

Shock: Evernote company likes Evernote feature – but, okay, it is good

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I have a love/tolerate relationship with Evernote: what it does well, it does well, except when it doesn’t. Still I live in this app a lot of the time and when I’m not in it I’m oftentimes on the web. You’ve heard of that. Possibly you haven’t heard of the Evernote Web Clipper. Take a look at this:

Browsing the web is a key part of your daily routine. Collecting the best of what you browse should be easy, but it’s not. Bookmarks are serviceable, but they’re hard to manage in quantity and they aren’t searchable. This is why we built Web Clipper. Today, we’re launching an update that makes it even better.

Popular sites perfectly captured with the new Web Clipper – Jeremy Brand Yaun, Evernote blog (30 June 2015)

The short version is that it’s better at saving the best-known web pages like Amazon or, even more popular, LinkedIn. The better answer is that if you haven’t tried it, go to it, regardless of what website you want to grab a piece of and keep offline. Read the full piece.